The Lennon-McCartney song, A Day in the Life, which must be one of the great songs of all time

#62, May 21, 2005

Money for Nothing

I presented this text to the Board of Trustees of Richard Stockton College in the fall of 2004, while I was the President of the college's Faculty Assembly. Some of the words are specific to the Stockton situation, but the conundrum of the role of the academic in the modern world is a more general one.

The Lennon-McCartney song, A Day in the Life, must be one of the greatest songs written – it came in at number 8 in Philadelphia radio station WXPN 88.5's best songs of all time, though this list had “Thunder Road” by a little known New Jersey artist at number one so it is a somewhat questionable ranking. A Day in the Life has two very different components to it. There are the main verses, which begin with a somewhat disembodied and ethereal John Lennon singing that “he read the news today, oh boy,” and then going on to describe certain things that he observed like a movie about the English army winning the war, and a traffic accident involving someone in the House of Lords. There is also, however, a bridge in the song, written and sung by McCartney, which I always associate with the rushed and harried workday. I am sure you all know how it goes:

Woke up

Got out of bed

Dragged a comb

Across my head

Found my way downstairs

And had a cup

And looking up I noticed I was late,

Found my coat and grabbed my hat,

Made the bus in seconds flat,

etc… ending with the cigarette and someone speaking, which takes us back to one of Lennon’s dreamscapes.

Well, at this point you are probably thinking that I am completely off my trolley (or double-decker bus, as they might say on Penny Lane), but there is a reason to my madness. This song, after all, speaks to the modern human condition – the going back and forth between the contemplative and the active, the cerebral and the material, and so on. Our lives seem to be divided between the day-to-day hustle and bustle on the one hand, and, on the other, those moments when we can take in the world and wonder about what it is that makes things tick and how it might all be imagined differently.

You’re still thinking I am mad, of course, because a Board of Trustees meeting is not the usual venue for a discourse on the human condition. But I want to use this song, in a way to represent the working lives of faculty members to people who might be, not so much unsympathetic to academics, but rather perplexed by what we do and how we justify it to ourselves, people who work in a corporate world where the 9 to 5 week and a couple of weeks vacation is the norm.

For, one of the most common reactions to us when we speak to people outside of our guild is the testy refrain: “You only teach twelve hours a week – what a joke! Wish I could do such an easy job! How much do you get paid for doing that? Wow, what does that work out at per hour?” I think Dire Straits made a song about this in the 80s – “money for nothing” which focused on the cushy lives of university professors (perhaps that wasn’t what it was about).

Needless to say, this common response is not a realistic view of what we do as faculty members at Richard Stockton College. I want to provide a more realistic picture for you by doing two things: one is to focus on the general life of a faculty member in academe to explain how it is much more complex than the picture given in the average reaction – and that it is much closer to the hurly-burly McCartney images than that person would think; the other is to highlight for you how the Stockton faculty member has a pretty difficult lot compared to most others, and that if it can be said that the contemplative Lennon-esque moments are a prerequisite of faculty development (which I would argue that they are) then we have less chance to switch away from the McCartney time-work discipline so that we can put our thinking caps on.

I’ll take these in turn – first, the general condition for the faculty member. Obviously we do more than just work in the classroom, for those twelve hours. There are three parts to our work – teaching, service to the community, and research and professional development. All of these are taken very seriously by almost everyone in the academic community. Our teaching involves massive amounts of preparation to develop each course, and for every class taught during the semester, not to mention the setting of exams, doing the assigned reading, and the grading of papers. In addition, we need to engage in institutional reproduction and join innumerable committees, attending umpteen meetings during the course of a semester. All the while we need to publish or perish.

And, when we are not publishing as much as we would like, we are constantly agonizing over the need to do so, internalizing huge amounts of guilt about not producing as much as that mythic faculty member who we imagine is out there, who once managed to teach an overload, appear on all the college’s major committees, bring up children, and publish a book every year.

In fact, our workday never really ends. While we commute to work in the morning and return home to our friends and families along with our fellow citizens, this return may be after teaching a class that ends at ten o’clock at night. And even if it ends at a more reasonable hour, there is still the need to prepare for forthcoming classes, grade papers, or undertake research and writing. This frequently takes us into the early hours of the morning.

And while much of our teaching is compressed into two semesters, providing long inviting summers (like those of teachers in high schools), unlike other teachers, there is a need to be using that time to undertake research and writing, and to stay current with the literature in our fields. Frequently, when you talk to faculty members you realize that they seldom have vacations, where they are completely away from their work. More frequently they will organize their travels around conference papers or places where they need to go for research.

Now to turn to the second point, namely the situation for the Stockton faculty. Faculty members at Stockton work harder than most of their peers in the profession. The work loads of most university professors are 2&2, three hour courses; the colleges to which we want to be compared have 3&2 schedules, again with 3 hour courses. We at Stockton teach 3&3, all four-hour courses. We thus spend more time in classes and have less time available for preparation. Our classes are generally larger than those taught elsewhere, as our very high student-faculty ratio reveals.

Of course, you may have noticed that the outgoing President of Middlebury recently wrote in a letter to The Times that student-faculty ratios really weren’t so important, as there would be a range of different kinds of courses, big and small, so that the student might learn in different environments; but from the faculty perspective larger classes mean more labor grading, greater difficulty engaging with students, and so forth. And anyway, the current Middlebury President immediately followed up with a letter refuting his predecessor (something that was obviously essential because his predecessor was trampling on one of the college’s most important selling points – its low student-faculty ratio).

Very few of our classes are small, we have almost no seminars at the college to speak of, and this means that one of the most valued forms of learning in liberal arts colleges – the small seminar in which students can express their ideas – is seldom to be experienced on our campus by either faculty or students.

And the fact that our students need to spend more hours in the classroom than most college students, exacerbates this problem. Given that students generally need to work while attending college, this means that they have very little time in which they can sit back and ruminate about how many holes there are in Blackburn, Lancashire, and they have very little time to do the reading that we would like them to do. Consequently, each hour of teaching is far more labor intensive than that experienced at many universities and colleges, where a faculty member can expect to build his or her classes around well-prepared students.

But, if the teaching load wasn’t sufficiently problematic for us, we are also required, if we would get tenure, to produce more than many of our peers, and certainly much more than people at competing institutions. So we need to find time to put our feet up and wonder why those Blackburn holes are so small, and, not just that, we need to come up with some publishable reasons for their diminutive quality. We also need to do this in less time than faculty at many institutions, and with less support. Our tenure clocks are five years instead of six, and we have no sabbatical policy for new faculty.

Finally, one of the aspects of being a faculty member at Stockton that is not taken into consideration is that we do our own advising, while many other colleges have assistant deans to do this work. The average faculty member has more than 30 advisees (in some programs, you may have advise around 80 students), and for each one a very complicated, not to say Byzantine, set of requirements must be met before they graduate. This advising means constant email communication with students, and extends from discussions of classes to career choices, with a letter of recommendation required to help the students reach their goals.

Unfortunately, the world has been moving steadily from the contemplative to the hustle and bustle, from a pre-industrial work ethic of lazy Sundays and blue Mondays, to a time-work discipline where every moment of the day is calibrated and used to fullest efficiency and where the bottom line of profitability is used to measure value. As such, the world moves from Lennon to McCartney, with only the occasional glimpse of the cerebral and ethereal sneaking in, and then only in our moments of leisure, which have become commercialized and commodified in their own right.

Colleges have become caught up in this as well. Much more than was the case ten years ago faculty members have to account for themselves and provide justification for all that they do in financial terms. We can no longer suggest that what we teach is in and of itself valuable simply because we teach it; that perhaps it is valuable to the degree that it is not applicable to some vocational track or social need. And some of this may be a good thing – and we need to realize that the lights have changed. But there will always be something that remains that is irreducible to notions of profit and loss, which will in fact be threatened by this impulse, possibly leading to the demise of American academic preeminence in the world.

Thus the life of the faculty member becomes increasingly anachronistic in the minds of those who are not part of academe. It seems like a luxury, that humanity may perhaps no longer need. As such, the justifications laid out above seem increasingly to be self-serving and defensive, and fewer people are willing to listen. How does one justify a small class, where a few people’s lives are transformed by the close engagement with a particularly difficult text? One no longer can. Almost all the courses that had a profound impact on me as a student, and which help explain why I am a historian today, would no longer be taught at most colleges and universities, and certainly would not have a prayer of being taught at Stockton – for the simple reason that they did not bring in the kinds of dollars that the college believes needs to be generated in each course.

Two points to end on: First, most of us would not give up what we do, even if we were offered large sums of money; the appeal is the chance to think -- to live the life of the mind, even if that seems cliché; it is also the chance to do the labor that we, at least, believe is crucial for society if we are not to end up destroying ourselves. And, in this vein, we have a choice that comes from the song I have been using as my text – we can either turn ourselves on, or we can hear that loud ever-growing crescendo of noise that seems to end in an apocalyptic crash, followed by nothingness. Speaking for myself, at least, I’d rather be turned on.